The Patriot Post® · Wokeness Endangering Americans' Health

Some form of the famous Hippocratic Oath is taken by medical students across the nation every year. The essence of the oath is captured by the Latin phrase Primum non nocere, translated “First do no harm.” This principle of medical professionals applying their knowledge and skills to help and not to harm is essential in establishing the trust of society in the medical field.

This trust is foundational for doctor and patient. In effect, the doctor is assuring the patient that concern for their welfare is the primary motivating factor as the doctor seeks to both diagnose and prescribe treatment for the patient’s healing.

But the doctor-patient relationship has been eroding, and that erosion is thanks in large part to the leftist political worldview. The gender cult is an obvious example of “first do harm,” and its kissing cousin, critical race theory (CRT), likewise acts as an ideological cancer spreading the poison of Marxism throughout the culture.

This woke cancer has effectively taken over the academy, infecting higher institutions across the country with the debilitating CRT dogma of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Predictably, the result is the politicization of everything by fueling the worst form of politics — identity politics.

Nowhere has this been more evident within the medical community than via the radical gender-bending ideology of “transgenderism.” Here the medical community is increasingly pressured to bow to the insane dogma that gender is merely and solely a social construct. There is, after all, a lot of money to be made creating long-term patients. States like California are passing laws attempting to criminalize any objection or resistance to the furtherance of administering gender mutilation upon the healthy bodies of children. And that’s just one example.

Race is a similar problem. Back in October 2019, California passed AB241. This legislation was signed into law by Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom, and it was touted as a means to tackle systemic racism within the medical field. The bill requires medical professionals to undergo training every couple of years over the dubious claim of implicit bias.

AB241 bemoaned “examples of how implicit bias affects perceptions and treatment decisions of physicians and surgeons, leading to disparities in health outcomes,” and encouraged “strategies to address how unintended biases in decision making may contribute to healthcare disparities by shaping behavior and producing differences in medical treatment along lines of race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, socioeconomic status or other characteristics.” In other words, the Golden State passed a law codifying education in CRT as mandatory for all medical professionals in the state.

Is this about concern over making better doctors? On the contrary, it has nothing to do with the science of medicine; rather, it’s about furthering a political ideology and about conditioning the state’s medical community into accepting the radical leftist dogma of CRT because the goal is demographically based equity outcomes rather than doctors doing no harm to their individual patients no matter their ethnic or identity group.

It should be noted that AB241 is correctly being challenged over its blatant infringement on medical professionals’ First Amendment rights to free speech. Forced or compelled speech is not free, and that is exactly what AB241 is looking to do.

It’s not just medical care, but mental health. Robin Atkins, a mental health professional, recently wrote an article in The Spectator observing, “A large number of mental health professionals currently seem to value political advocacy over peer and client relationships.” The common denominator is the values of CRT being placed before and often to the detriment of the patient.

“In other conversations,” according to Atkins, “therapists have admitted that they try to sneak critical race and gender theory into their sessions with patients, even if their patients are resistant to the idea. Some have even said that they encourage their patients to engage in certain types of political activism as a form of ‘empowerment.’” This is politics masquerading as medicine.

Throughout the COVID pandemic, the nation witnessed this reality in full effect. Genuine scientific inquiry, observations, and objections to the COVID narrative were maligned as “dangerous kook conspiracy theories.” Suggestions that the origin of the novel virus was anything but natural were declared to be fringe misinformation. It was ironically classified as evidence of one failing to “follow the science.” Now, with the preponderance of evidence pointing to the Wuhan lab leak being the most likely source, the same authorities who lambasted anyone daring to question the official narrative are merely shrugging off any criticism or simply contending that they were in fact engaged in responsible science based upon their knowledge at the time.

All wokeness has done is undercut that most important facet of societal stability and sustainability: trust. As recent polling has indicated, Americans’ trust in the nation’s institutions is at an all-time low, and much of that can be laid at the feet of leftist politics. As politicians have increasingly bought off the institutions, Americans’ trust in the institutions has increasingly waned.

If you can’t trust that your doctor is giving you a correct and accurate diagnosis of your health based upon sound science and not politically motivated dogma, then who can you trust?